Survival Instinct

by T. Fox Dunham

Matteo watched Tony Roach offer a glass vial of Sug’ to a junkie kneeling in the filthy alley, then he chambered a round and aimed the Max-9 at Tony. “You know what it would do to my rep if I let you deal in Scarfo territory?” The junkie grabbed the vial and ran into the crowd of kids partying on South Street.

“Welcome to the bottom of the food chain,” Roach said. He clicked his tongue.

“Everything from Broad Street to Penn’s Landing belongs to the Scarfos,” Matteo said, always defending. Philly constantly challenged you, and he couldn’t show weakness.

Roach shoved the little vials of Sugar into the pocket of his ripped Eagles sweater, then smelled Matteo like a dog. “No one will remember street trash like you when you’re dead.” He sniffed again, and Matteo felt exposed. “And that ain’t going to be too much longer, is it?”

“Forget it,” Matteo said, posturing, overcompensating. He’d just come down to South Street to collect a vig from Skinny Ed but couldn’t find him or any of the other degenerate gamblers who owed. Then, he’d seen this punk dealing Sug’ on Scarfo turf, and that had to be answered even though he wasn’t strong enough for a fight. The neuropathy numbed his hand, and Matteo couldn’t feel the trigger.

“I can… smell it in you. Death. Eating you up. Eating your blood.”

Matteo tried to cover himself with the gun, but his hand shook, nearly dropping it. Did Roach know? If he did, he couldn’t let him leave this alley alive—and it had to be fast. College kids swarmed down South Street, hitting the bars and restaurants, home for spring break. Most had been drunk since noon or high off Sugar—the new narcotic from China that the Scarfo Family had introduced to America. PPD ran riot control, trying to regulate the crowds.

Matteo aimed for the Eagles cap covering Roach’s head, hiding his face, and Roach yanked back his head spat a viscous wad at Matteo’s right hand. Foam burned his skin, and fumes burned his eyes, aggravating his nausea. Matteo dropped the Max-9 and rubbed his hand on his jeans. The pain quickly eased, but before he could pick up his piece, Roach tried to run. Matteo grabbed his green hood and whipped him into the side of a rusty dumpster. “Burn me with acid?” he said. “Forget you.” He punched him in the jaw but instead of feeling the satisfying snap of the bone, his fist hit something squishy, rubbery under his skin. Then, twin tendrils tore through Roach’s sweatshirt and lashed out, slicing his black leather jacket. Matteo dodged the arms, but he slipped on a broken beer bottle and collided with a brick wall. Roach lunged at him, and Matteo slashed his face with the bottle, knocking him back. An obsidian carapace broke through the faux skin and gleamed in the light from the sickly floodlight hanging on the side of Captain Spizie’s Pizza. Silvery eyes clustered like grapes through his sockets, and Roach clicked its beak.

Was this hell, Matteo wondered? Would he know if he had died in the night? He didn’t mind eternal damnation so much. He’d sinned in his life though never against anyone who hadn’t consented to the rules of their world. What scared him was being forgotten—just another street punk who got what he deserved.

They wrestled in the alley, and black beetles rained down from Roach’s mouth and crawled all over Matteo’s emaciated body. The reek of ammonia finally won, and he vomited onto the fast-food wrappers and syringes. His heart pounded in his ears, and some primal fear gripped his bones, warning him, compelling him to run, run for the Delaware and hide beneath its waves.

“Yo Matt!” his cousin Horatio said, disobeying his orders and leaving the car. “What the holy fuck is—”

“My piece!” Matteo ripped himself free with the last of his strength. Ho got him the 9, and Matteo fired at Roach’s chest. Roach stumbled backwards, falling into a stairwell.

“What kind of CGI shit was that?” his cousin said.

“I told you keep the car running,” Matteo wiped the bile and coffee off his leather jacket. In the distance, a PPD cruiser squawked, and Matteo searched the dark stairwell with his phone flashlight so he could put one in the guy’s head before anyone saw. Roach wasn’t a “made” guy—an official soldier in the DeCalv family—but whacking him would still cause a beef.

“You’re clipping him?” Horatio asked.

“He knows.”

“Oh shit.” 

It wasn’t personal, just survival. If Roach told anyone, Matteo knew how it would go down. Sal Scarfo and the capos would send flowers first, show support, say it was such a shame because he was so young, but they’d wonder about his reliability. A guy with nothing to lose couldn’t be leveraged and would be a threat to the family. That’s how guys got whacked out, and he wasn’t ready for that yet.

“Where the hell is he?” Matteo said, finding the stairwell empty. Something scurried overhead, banging the rusted fire escapes. Matteo tried aiming for it, but the exertion finally caught up. Police sirens keened from the street, and Horatio tugged on his sleeve.

“You’re out of time!” Matteo sighed, holstered his piece, and walked to the car. “That thing was going to lay its eggs in your ass,” Horatio said. He helped him into the passenger side of the Caddy. Ho pulled out onto 34^th street as the flashing lights of two PPD cruisers lit the night then turned onto the I-95 onramp. Riding in the passenger side aggravated his constant nausea, and Matteo sniffed piquant peppermint from a glass vial he kept in his jacket pocket, easing the symptoms.

“Some kind of mask?” Ho said.

“You’ve heard the junkie stories,” Matteo said, coming to terms with the reality that his reality had been a fantasy all along. Something had hollowed Roach out the same way Matteo was being hollowed out—his body, his mind, his delusion of dominance and immortality. They invaded his streets, his city, challenging the base of power he’d built and his chance at finally being upped from crew thug to soldier in the Scarfo Family.

“The DeCalvs are just messing with us,” his cousin said, sounding desperate to preserve his reality.

“More things in heaven and… shit.”

“Do we… tell the skipper?” Ho merged onto 95 and drove parallel to the Susquehanna River.

“Fucking forget about it. Nothing went down tonight. Just business. How much Sugar did you move, anyway?”

“Freaking gold mine,” Ho said. “The family’s pazzo for charging pennies. What is it? A new horse tranq?”

“The boss brought it back from a source in Hong Kong,” Matteo said. Something scratched at his neck, and Matteo pulled a beetle out from under his shirt. The thing squirmed in his burned hand. He threw it out the window, then checked for more.

“You need some Raid.”

“The mint extract would work just as well,” Matteo said. “They hate the smell of terpene.”

“Billy Bait wants to buy more of those little safecrackers you cooked up for him. Blew the door right off.”

“Just get me home. I have to be at the office at six.”

“I got you, Coz. No one’s going to know.”

“Can you smell it?” Matteo asked Shark. The nurse wrapped the rubber torniquet around Matteo’s arm, then flicked his fingers along his arm, stinging his skin as he examined his limb with all the grace of a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse. “I know junkies that would hit this on their first try.”

“Sorry dude. Your veins are rollin’.” He undid the tourniquet, then wrapped it around his wrist. Matteo braced himself for the pain and distracted himself by studying the sepia ink pattern of the Maori tats that decorated the nurse’s arm. Shark drove the catheter into thin flesh on the back of his hand, dug around for twenty years, then gave up. “I’m going to get you some water, dude.” The nurse yanked off the tourniquet and left the infusion room, leaving him sitting alone in the circle of chairs. Three IV bags of toxic drugs hung from the pole above him, and the sight of the ochre color of the vincristine triggered a wave of nausea.

Ho came back into the chemo room carrying WaWa coffee. “Bobby Toro called, asked if you were working at the site today. I said we were headed down to Florida to collect a thing.” His cousin lied for him. Really, Matteo would be throwing up the next four days as the chemo killed the cells lining his stomach, and then his white count would plummet, turning the flu into a killer. They’d been lucky so far. Matteo started shaving his head after his dark hair started falling out, but the weight loss was obvious now. Matteo didn’t know how much longer he could hide it.

“Did he mention anything about last night?” Matteo asked.

“I told him you scared off a DeCalv dealer. He didn’t care.”

“Weird shit, right?”

His cousin shrugged it off, dismissing what he’d seen, and sat down in the next chair in the circle. Matteo envied him his denial, no longer having that luxury. Impending death had robbed him of denial, ripping him open to all the terrible truths in the natural world.

“What did Bobby Toro want anyway?” he asked, sensing trouble.

“They’re cutting the price again.”

“This comes from the skip?”

“Says it’s a marketing thing.” Ho bit into the doughnut, and Matteo sniffed his peppermint.

Matteo couldn’t work out the angle. Sugar was a freaking gold mine. It felt like H but felt easy like weed. The old guys were greedy, and the families should have been charging a lot more.

Shark pushed a patient’s wheelchair into the room. A young guy, not more than eighteen, clutched a pink vomit basin. His skin hugged his bones like plastic wrap—couldn’t have been more than eighty pounds. Shark lifted him into a chair then started looking for his port. The kid looked up and gazed through Matteo, reminding him of a painting from a Roman church wall in Florence he’d seen of a skeletal victim of the Bubonic plague.

He looked at his future.

“Forget this,” Matteo said, feeling suddenly so certain. Something snapped in him.

“How are you going to beat this without your medicine?”

“I’m not going to get better,” he said, finally accepting it. Matteo realized that he wasn’t buying time to live but time to make a choice, to come to terms with the reality that he no longer had control over whether he died. He only had control over how.

“Cuz, you can’t do this,” Horatio said.

“Just what do you think I’m doing?”

“Giving up ’cause you’re scared. Or ’cause you’re tired of throwing up or the pain or some shit.”

At first, Matteo wanted to slap him, but he saw the fear in the kid’s eyes. Ho couldn’t help it, and Matteo kissed his cheek. “Cuz, I’d let them burn me alive if I thought I had the smallest chance, but all I’m doing is wasting the time I have left. Something’s going down. And I can’t fight it and lymphoma.”

When he walked out of the chemo room, his legs nearly gave out. Matteo’s heart raced, and he almost turned back for the chair. But after a few moments, he pulled himself up, got on his feet, feeling lighter, even exhilarated. It didn’t feel real, but it didn’t matter. He focused on the task at hand.  

All this weird shit had to be connected: Roach, the sale on Sugar, the way Salvatore Scarfo had been acting since his trip to China. The boss was his best bet of figuring it out, and no one would see a street punk with no rep coming. Now he had to play it smart, keep his eyes open and be patient—not an easy task for a man with only a few seconds left on the clock.

He staked out Scarfo’s gated house in Chestnut Hill for a week before he finally got a lead. Finally, on Saturday night, all the family capos showed up for some kind of meet—Bobby Toro, the underboss, Chuckie Tomatoes and Tommy Tone. Even Vickie Veal showed up, which surprised the hell out of Matteo since the last time he’d heard, Vic’s heart failure was so bad he couldn’t get out of bed, but there he was wobbling up to Scarfo’s Bronco. They all got in like they were going on a road trip, and Matteo followed them down main street, keeping his distance until they turned onto 76 and headed west through Philly. Nausea twinged—a side effect of the damage to his stomach that would take time to heal—and he focused on his breathing.

They drove for ninety minutes until they got off onto 222 into Amish country, then parked outside of Lancaster Dairy. Matteo pulled into a nearby lot and slipped in through the loading dock. The place reeked of sour milk, and Matteo sniffed from the peppermint to ease the nausea. Moldy straw littered the concrete floor, and dusty, pipe-strangled cages filled the front of the building; however, the cows had all gone home. Eventually, he found the capos gathered in a storage room filled with metal milking urns. Matteo hid behind a pile of crates and waited, hoping he hadn’t made the trip for nothing. Then, the other parties arrived, and Matteo couldn’t believe it when the DeCalvs showed up. They didn’t talk, didn’t shoot. Finally, a couple of Feds and state troopers escorted in a government type wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. It took him a minute, but he finally recognized him: Senator Byron Cain. Still, no one spoke, but once they had gathered, a clicking noise adjusted tempo and frequency, tapping and rapping on his skull until his head spun like a merry-go-round. He opened the peppermint vial once more to draw succor from the herb, but he quickly sealed it when Bobby Toro broke from the meet and started sniffing around the room. Matteo crawled to a side door and fled deeper into the complex.

Violet light bathed the lattice of pipes and tubes on the main floor, illuminating a circle of vacant harnesses that had been designed to lock cattle in place. Pumps pulsed on poles over the circle, sucking fluid through plastic tubes, and Matteo looked through the bars. Webs suspended human bodies over a stainless-steel cistern, and hairy spiders surveyed their cattle, crawling methodically over their bare limbs, chest and heads—workers set to a meticulous task, checking and mending the diaphanous web of silver strands that wove a sock over the poor souls. Bulbous pink sacks flexed and pulsed on their backs as they worked, tending to their crop.

Coffee and acid vomit burned Matteo’s nose and throat, and he spewed into a pile of moldy straw.

“Is someone… Oh, Mother Mary. Forgive me.” Rays of violet light rolled over his body, obscuring his face, but Matteo recognized the squeak in his voice.

“Skinny?” They had shaved his head, fed tubes into his emaciated body, but Matteo always knew the guys that owed him money. An infusion pump ticked away, exchanging fluids, syphoning his essence. Tubes from a pipe above fed a violet substance into his body and another line penetrating his neck sucked out an intermittent syrup that dripped into an urn below. A sour-sweet odor filled the warehouse, and Matteo recognized the scent of their new wonder dope.

“Matt? Is that you? Shit. I would have paid up. You didn’t have to do this.”

“Do what, Ed?” A door banged open on the far side of the room.

“They said if I just gave some blood, they’d clear my debt.” Other guys moaned and wept, trapped in their silk nets, and Matteo recognized one of them from a poker game in Fishtown. All these guys must have owed. “Get ‘em off of me! Please, Christ. Get them off me.”

“Shut your mouth,” Matteo whispered, but it was too late. Bobby Toro chambered a round in his .45 and cautiously searched the milking circle. A powerful ammonia stench soured the sweet air, burning his eyes.

“I done bad shit,” Ed said. “But don’t deserve this.”

“It’s not your fault,” Matteo said. He tried to rip him from the net but couldn’t break the strands. “It’s just where the story ends.”

“I’m sorry!” Ed screamed, apologizing to his ghosts. A bullet rang one of the steel pipes like a bell, and Matteo ran to an exit then fled into a side lot outside the building. Bloated bovine bodies rotted in the open, pumping putrescence onto the blacktop, and Matteo spewed more bile before he stepped carefully through the liquifying animals, nearly slipping on their slimy entrails. Bobby took another shot at him but missed, and Matteo made it around the side of the building and got to his car.

He checked into a hotel off 30 by Dutch Wonderland and stood under a hot shower, trying to process what he’d seen. It was all like something out of a horror movie, but then he’d been living in a horror movie since he’d found that mass under his arm. Nothing felt real anymore, and everything felt possible, even inevitable.

He toweled off and looked at himself in the mirror. His skin clung to his ribs and his face, and his eyes had sunken into his skull, reminding him of the many junkies who patronized his services.

I done bad shit…

But he did deserve it.

His dad owed a bookie, skipped town. Mom ran off with a truck driver. He floated in the system for a while, then joined the Kensies, a street gang—the first step to joining a crew, serving a capo. Matteo stole cars, sold cigarettes, acted as lookout, anything Bobby Toro asked him to do. Finally, he started making good money running crystal meth to dealers. They taught him to cash in on weaknesses, get your hooks into them and milk them good. Then, he’d built his rep up so one day they’d open the books and up him. Being a soldier in the Scarfo family was like becoming Philly royalty, and the boost to his rep would give him the security he’d never had as a kid.

But real security was an illusion. Sickness infiltrated, violated, and no matter how often he showered, he felt a film covering his skin. He couldn’t shake the feeling that God had done this to him for the evil he’d done. Afterall, Matteo was no different than those things—a cancer on the soul—and he wanted to die righteous now, die clean.

Matteo’s burner lit up and a text message from Vic popped:

Yo. Matteo. Dress nicely. Accessorize your shit. Shine your shoes. Everyone is going to get what they deserve. Joe’s place. 7PM. We’re going to be fucking kings!

He had to admire them, dangling his heart’s desire in front of him. They just wanted him to come in so they could whack him.

Accessorize your shit.

He got on 76 East and headed east back to Philly, going home for what was probably the last time. On the way, he stopped at Scarfo Construction in Conshy where he’d worked the last year, playing cards and hanging out on site to justify what the family called a “no-show” job that justified his income and got him health insurance. He slipped in the backdoor, making sure the place was empty, then found the manager’s keys and accessed the secure demolition shed. Once inside, he got to work accessorizing.

The whole family assembled in the banquet room below Marcello’s in South Philly—all dressed in their fine suits, silk handkerchiefs folded into a triangle, hair greased back like they were going to someone’s funeral. Matteo had been sized for his suit before chemo, so there was plenty of extra room at the waist.

The boss of their family, Salvatore Scarfo—a small meticulously dressed man who made up for his lacking stature by beating guys into mush—cupped Matteo’s face and kissed his cheek. “Special day,” he said, and he led Matteo to a table where a bowl, a box of wooden matches, and a saint card had been prepared—props for the bullshit ceremony. The other capos watched, unified in their smallest movements, acting as a single entity.

“Why don’t we cut the bullshit?” Matteo said.

“You nearly gave Toro a heart attack running after you.” Matteo backed away from Scarfo. Two guys blocked the stairs, and he maneuvered to try to get them all into the blast radius. “Relax, Matt. No need to mess up a good thing. We know about the firecracker you’ve got stuffed down your pants. And we know you’ve got nothing to lose.” Scarfo sniffed the air between them. “We can smell the renegade cells growing in you—a defect of your biology. You’re an evolutionary mistake, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be useful.”

Matteo ripped open his shirt, shedding buttons and exposed the device he’d rigged up. His finger easily found the large trigger he’d used in the circuit—something he could feel and turn at a moment’s notice. In two seconds, the capacitors would charge, then detonate the RDX. The cement walls of the basement would focus the blast, and they’d go to hell as a family. To his surprise, no one moved. No one reached. Normally, these guys would sell out their own mothers to save their asses, and Matteo had expected them to knock each other over to get clear. Instead, they just stood there.

The choir clicked, and the sound drilled into Matteo’s head. He struggled to focus.

“I’d rather be dead than one of those things.”

“You mean Tony Roach? A soldier. We can rewrite DNA—all or just some offending codes. So perhaps before you go out in a final and futile act of redemption, you’ll hear my offer. We can make you . . . whole again. Whole forever. No need to rot and ooze in a box or be blown away—ash on the wind.”

“Forget that shit,” Matteo said. “You’ll promise me anything.”

“Look at Vickie Veal,” Scarfo said. He took out a brush and removed an offending bit of dirt on his lapel. “His heart beats healthy in our service. This gift—our union—we offer you. So much strength.” The boss looked over Matteo the way a butcher looked over a cow. Matteo shivered. He’d always thought himself the predator, but now he realized he’d always been the prey.

“The devil always has a bill.”

“Of course,” Scarfo said. “There’s no need to deceive you. Why would we? You know what we are.”

“I can read the play,” Matteo said. “You’re either very old or very new.”

“There we were dormant beneath the earth until miners woke the hive. We burrowed into their heads and inherited such intelligence, such grace. It took some time, but once they stopped screaming in their minds and accepted, they realized the gifts we could give them, the delights our advanced biology could share.”

“Delights like Sugar?”

“To our chosen, we offer what your species has sought since your evolution.”

“An escape from the darkness,” Matteo said, nearly falling to his knees. All his bravado melted at the offer of life, and he hated himself for his weakness. He couldn’t help it. He would have made any deal, betrayed any loved one to keep living.  

“Do not feel shame,” Scarfo said. “Survival is your most basic instinct.”

“Will I still . . . feel? Think?”

Scarfo plucked a small, swollen bug from the back of his neck, and as he carried it over, its pineapple torso sparked and glowed. “You will think and feel and see and witness great things. You will be my warrior, my gladiator, my executioner. The bums and junkies and Feds will sing your legends.”

Matteo switched off the bomb then knelt to receive.